Brii said:
What I meant is that I felt the game chose to prioritize that style over the substance like story and character overall. Also, visuals, atmosphere and aesthetics can certainly have substance to them beyond being slick, cool and visually appealing. Visual storytelling is something I really appreciate. But I felt there was very little subtlty in that respect to the game. Any time something was visually meaningful, the game would directly tell me what it meant rather than letting the visuals speak for themselves. (I.E., constantly telling me EXACTLY what each palace and the denizens there were meant to represent when, frankly, it was already really obvious.) Also, the social links are more like nice little side stories for flavor, in my personal opinion. To me, the main story should have been the meat of the game, and it left me extremely disappointed. It felt hackeneyed and and unfocused, and seemed to think it was more insightful and revolutionary in it's ideas than it was. The story scenes felt over long and constantly railroading me into plot sequences when I really just wanted to up my stats and hang out with the social links. It's hard for me to see the social links as the bulk of the game when I felt like it was constantly trying to pull me away from them to dump plot on me. For the ~120 hours I put into the game, I can't imagine the social links contributing to more than 10. |
Interesting. I'm only 12 or hours into it, but I already felt like I've spent a good chunk of time just hanging with different people.
We'll see how it goes as I get farther in. To me, the point of Persona is all about the social links, which is large reason why I struggle to play through SMTIV. Story and characters aren't very good.
